Archive for the ‘Theme Design’ Category

How I find profitable niches and make money

Jun 29, 2010 General Stuff, PPC, SEO, Theme Design

I know that this blog has been a bit bollocks so far, but please remember I am still a newbie and it’s all one big learning curve for me.

In the last year I have gone from being totally broke to working full time from home in my own web based business. I’m still a long way from being a millionaire but at least I’m my own boss and I get to do what I please. I know that many of you out there also aspire to be full time web geeks like me so I will offer you tips and little secrets that have helped me to get this far.
Maybe some of the techniques I use are a little unorthodox or sometimes quite old school, but I’m just going to talk about what works for me. Some of you more experienced web marketers may be able to offer me help and advise which I will share with everyone.

Were all in this together folks, we gotta do the best we can with the short time we have. Work hard, earn some dough and enjoy our lives.

What I’m going to do now is tell you how I find new niches to promote affiliate products. I work mainly in fashion but the technique could be used for any sector.

Spyfu

An old tool but a goodie is spyfu.com. For those of you who haven’t used it before it’s a website that allows you to spy on the “big boys” PPC campaigns and see what keywords are performing best for them.

In my sector the major retailers have their fingers on the pulse re – latest trends and fads so by seeing what keywords they are bidding on I can sometimes manage to register a nice keyword rich domain and start some organic seo before the trend really kicks in.

Using this method I have just registered a cool two word .co.uk domain that matches exactly the name of a product that is tipped to be massive this autumn/winter. The name is not a copyright name and to be honest I couldn’t believe that it was available. I’m going to throw up a nice looking site on the domain and start some link building to hopefully make a few quid before Christmas.

I still did the usual research in the Google keyword tool and Google trends to find a nice steady increase in search month on month. I also like to check on Google blogs and twitter to see if the product is getting talked about much.

The next step is to see how difficult it would be to rank well for the term. So I stick my keywords in Google and find that I will only have to compete with a few shitty subdomains and a newspaper article. I’m confident that I will achieve a top 3 spot in time for the gold rush!

Yahoo Answers

As many of you are probably already aware, a lot of traffic can be got from answering questions. I have a site dedicated to electronic music equipment and most of the search engine traffic is from people typing questions into the search engines. If I can’t think what articles to write I will head over to Yahoo Answers chuck some of my keywords into the search box and see what questions people are asking. I’ll then go and write a post answering it. This is not really to get traffic from yahoo Answers itself (although I will still use it) but to get visitors from people typing the same question into search engines.

On one site last year I earned over £1300.00 in one week with a post entitled “Should I Fix my Gas and Electricity prices?”!

Stumbleupon Buzz

If I’m ever looking for some inspiration I will head over to StumbleUpon Buzz to see whats getting lots of hits in my niche. To do this, simply change the word “all” to “[MY NICHE]” in the URL. You should see some sites that are getting lots of views so you can be fairly confident that people are interested in that specific subject.

Ebay Pulse

Another old school tip, but I have come up with some really good ideas from spending 10 – 20 minutes on here. the trick is to drill right down into the relevant category to see what are the most watched items. By doing this you will start to see patterns emerge. The problem is – I come up with so many ideas, I don’t have time to work on them all. Maybe I should start an exclusive news letter about my ideas? That’s an idea!

Ebay Pulse

Trend Blogs

I’m a big fan of some of the trend blogs out there. My favorites are Trend Hunter, Springwise and Trend Watching. I have all three in my RSS reader as they can be great for inspiration. Yes a lot of the items are not specifically related to the Internet, but I still think they can help you to “think outside the box”.

So there you have it. There is my little list of ways I look for niches. It has served me well so far and I am confident that it will continue to do so.

I’d be really interested to hear from you lot! have you got any cool niche research tips that you would like to share?



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Another site, another WordPress custom theme

Jan 21, 2010 Affiliate Marketing, Theme Design, Wordpress

I’m quite getting the hang of creating my own WordPress themes now. I’m still having problems with them displaying correctly in all browsers but I am sure that I will have that problem solved soon.

My new site is – Cross Trainer Sale and I think the subject matter is fairly self explanatory!

I’m doing quite well with domain names that have  “sale” on the end.  Obviously, I would have preferred “cross trainer” but by sticking the word “sale” on there I should pickup traffic for “cross trainer”, “cross trainers” and “cross trainers for sale”.

Who knows if I will earn anything from the site. I’ve been working really hard creating my latest sites and I am too impatient to wait for natural rankings so I think I will PPC this one too.

Having said that, I have started the laborious job of link building. I use a mixture of forum posts, blog posts and link exchange requests. I’ve wrote a simple database in Filemaker that enables me to track  the webmaster’s I’ve contacted and check that my link is live.

The next few weeks I’m going to knuckle down and work on my custom WordPress themes. I am confident that there is a market for affiliate marketing themes and when I have reached a level that I am satisfied with, I’m going to look at releasing some for public use.


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My new website ready to launch

Jan 14, 2010 Affiliate Marketing, Theme Design, Wordpress

I have been working on my latest website for the last few days and I am really quite pleased at how it is shaping up.

The site is  called Hot Corsets and I am planning to promote it with google PPC. The subject is fairly self explanitory and I must say that I have rather enjoyed researching suitable merchants.

I’ve still got a few bits to tweak, as well as adding the content. It’s been built for  WordPress using a home made theme that I knocked up in Dreamweaver. One problem that I am having is getting the site to look right in IE 7 (I hate explorer!!) So I need to look at the CSS over the next few days.

I’m looking for some good quality links, so if anybody has a similar site and is interested in an exchange then give me a shout.

EDIT: I’ve since updated the site a bit, and it’s a nice little earner!

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Design your own Affiliate Marketing WordPress theme

Jan 11, 2010 Affiliate Marketing, Theme Design, Web Design, Wordpress

I’ve played around a bit at building my own WordPress theme after learning CSS and a little bit of PHP. Recently I  purchased a copy of “How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer” from Rockable Press. It only cost around $30 and I spent most of yesterday reading it. I’m now really excited because I am quite confident that I am not very far off being able to build my dream affiliate marketing WordPress theme.

It’s not for total newbies, but if you have a smidgen of CSS and HTML knowledge then you should be able to knock up a theme fairly easily.

The book talks you through designing the mock up in Photoshop (I use Fireworks), putting it all together in Dreamweaver before importing into WordPress and adding a few final tweaks.

I’m going to get started right away, so I will add some basic tutorials as I learn myself.

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Some tools I use when modding WordPress themes

Jan 4, 2010 Theme Design, Tools, Web Design, Wordpress

Most of my websites are built in WordPress because it is so easy to use. There is almost no limits to the stuff you can do to make it look and behave exactly how you want to. Below is a list of some of the tools I use when modding a WordPress theme -

Two books that have been indispensable to me when messing around with a theme are -

CSS: The Missing manual and WordPress Theme Design

If you really want to change the look of your site, then I strongly recommend that you learn some CSS.

The Web Developer’s Toolbar for Firefox is one of those gadgets that once you have used it you will not be able to imagine how you got on with out it. It’s just wonderful. Especially the “edit CSS” function that lets you play around with a sites CSS without changing any code. It is also a great way to learn CSS by trial and error. I also like the color information function that brings up all the hex code for the colour on any selected page.

Which leads me nicely onto the Kuler website. Have you seen it? If not get on over there immediately and have a play. It is a wonderful site that lets you come up with some beautiful colour combination’s as well as browsing thousands of others submitted by users. It also allows you to save combination’s which can later be imported into graphics programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks.

It’s attention to detail that make websites stand out from the rest, and I am surprised at the number of large sites that don’t even have a favicon! I know it’s not the be-all and end-all but it takes literally a couple of minutes to make one. A couple of seconds if you use the FavIcon Generator.

The RawHTML plugin allows you to add, well – raw html into your blog posts. I like to create price comparison type tables in dreamweaver and paste them into my site. Here is an example from my effects pedals website that I am building.

These are some of the tools that I use when modding WordPress themes. Good free themes can be found here and here.

All I need now are some tools to inspire me to write good content!


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